Business

Frictionless payments for new generation reader revenue models

By Papia Sen

November 23, 2018 at 4:41 PM

Paywall, a process that was coined and initiated a few decades ago, is now highly favored by the publishers. In fact, the process of aligning paywalls to the content has become so common now that the question isn’t about ‘will the consumers pay for content?’, instead, it has taken a different turn to ‘how many different subscription types can a reader put up with?’.

Quartz, The information and Axios have been ruling the subscription models since years now, while the competitors had to find inventive ways to bring in monetization. The Guardian came up with call-to-action micro support payment which worked really well for them. The Correspondent introduced pay-what-you-can-memberships for the readers while The Economist and The New York Times introduced ‘soft paywall’ that would help readers get access to a small amount of free articles per week.

In India, Swarajya, an independent digital media platform and magazine, has seen a spike in its paid readership with the adoption of a digital subscription model.

These monetization models worked differently for different newsrooms/publishers.

Now, coming to the question, why were the paywall models introduced?

With an increase in the ad inventory supply, falling CPMs and technologies like ad blockers, the publishers had a hard time to benefit out of ad revenues. Thus came the need for exploring alternative revenue models for publishers, subscription revenue being one of the top ideas.

For publishers who provided research papers and in-depth analysed content, backed up by investigative journalism, paywalls were a better option to add value to the readers, helping them gain insights and make better-informed business decisions.

At a philosophical level, it helps publishers write for the readers, not for the advertisers.

How did the evolution of paywalls begin?

The publishers were scared to lose the essence of what they are trying to achieve with their pieces while the readers were in search of magnificent knowledge. The readers started looking up to the paywall models, however, they slowly realised that they ended up paying for articles within a subscription that they were not interested in reading. They might have paid for one interesting article, after which, the rest of the articles were not of their significance.

We can draw an analogy from the CD days of music, wherein people paid for the whole CD just to listen to the top single.

Today, mainly four types of subscription models are implemented by majority of the publishers,

Hard paywalls - Requires paid subscription before any of their online content can be accessed

Soft paywalls - A metered paywall that allows users to view certain articles before requiring to buy the entire subscription

Combination of both - The publishers can select which articles to be given out to the readers for free and which set of premium pieces to be kept behind a subscription.

Pay per article - This model allows the reader to pay for only the articles they are interested in.

How does Accesstype help both publishers and readers?

Accesstype is a subscription platform built by Quintype. Publishers can integrate all the four types of paywall models depending upon the type of subscription. You can now seamlessly use our secure platform to get your articles shared with the readers.

Most publishers need readers to go through a lengthy process of filling in payment details, billing address and so on. Accesstype changes it all. We have integrated a frictionless payment method along with the paywalls. Now the readers do not have to spend minutes in performing payment process. A single click or swipe will help them gain access to the articles instantly. Accesstype is now integrated with the modern wallet technologies like Simpl and Paytm and this entire frictionless payment process is completely secure.

While we have successfully integrated this technology for our Indian users, we are under progress for implementing it for our international users as well.

Do you think Accesstype can help you increase subscription revenue??

Publishers, if you need Accesstype’s advantage to monetize better, then get in touch with us today at sales@quintype.com

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